I have been working as full stack developer past 7 years in stacks like react, react native , flutter, spring boot , nest, graphql so on and so forth. So far being generalist has worked for me as I am never out of projects. However recently I met one Engineering manager who advised me to become a specialist in one domain for better growth going forward . How do you all see this specialist vs generalist idea ?
I have a similar background. Here’s my Re.1 worth of advise based on the 11 years I’ve done this.
As a generalist, your superpower is the ability to learn different technology pieces quickly which, combined with good problem solving skills will make you indispensable to any org.
That said, you should build subject matter expertise in a few areas within the company. You can start building cross team rapport because you understand multiple systems well. This will make you the go to person for understanding overall architecture. Another way is to introduce new pieces of tech and spearheading it’s implementation across teams. That automatically makes you the authority for them
Being a generalist is great but you should think what stops you from being a speciality?
OR….
You just like to work across the stack?
Thanks , makes sense.
When companies are making good money and expanding rapidly - specialist will get preference.
When economic condition is bad, multiple layoff going on, cost cutting - specialist are fired first and generalist are hired so they can do work of multiple people.
That’s true as well. Say a person with 15 years it experiences with niche skill set will always have good job security. But same experience with average skills would have issues.
I'm in business strategy and majorly worked across different startups
When looking for a new role, HRs tell me they are looking for specialized experience, or my experiences do not count as they are less than 2 years (in each company)
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Specifically a question to all the t1 tech clg grads (mainly software engineers) earning 1l+ pm out of clg with a lot of scope for growth. Post mba avg salary is 1.5l per month.
I can understand ppl desperate for a career change and ...
I can share, I was working abroad post my T1 engineering. So you can imagine it must be > 1L. Like all those co...
I am a FullStack engineer working at a startup with 1 YOE, lately I have realised that there are more specialist roles (Frontend/SRE) in most companies and are paid really well.
I really like working FullStack (Typescript with Node/PHP)...
